Integrated circuits are manufactured using a sequence of masking steps to form in a substrate (typically called a "wafer") of semiconductor material, typically silicon, a plurality of transistors, diodes and other active and passive regions together with insulation layers and interconnect layers on the surface of the wafer to interconnect the active and passive regions, transistors and diodes. As integrated circuits become more complex with hundreds of thousands if not millions of transistors on each integrated circuit, the dimensions of the active regions in the semiconductor material used to form, for example, transistors, diodes and capacitive or resistive components, shrink. As these dimensions become smaller, more devices can be placed on a given area of silicon, but the yield (i.e. the number of useful devices obtained at the end of the manufacturing process divided by the largest number of useful devices theoretically possible) drops for many reasons, such as for example, processing defects (for example particulates, film defects, and masking defects), errors in mask alignment, and unwanted impurities in the wafer. With certain complex integrated circuits, as many as 20 to 30 masking steps may be employed and as many as 3 or 4 layers of interconnects may be required in order to produce an operative integrated circuit. Each of the masking steps must be carried out correctly and each of the interconnect layers must be formed as intended to obtain a working integrated circuit. Unfortunately, as the sizes of the integrated circuits increase the yield drops thereby increasing the costs of the resulting good integrated circuits. Moreover, as the number of masking steps and interconnect layers increases the time to obtain a finished integrated circuit from the time that the manufacturing process begins increases because each of the steps carried out to fabricate the integrated circuit is carried out in sequence. Accordingly, a method to reduce the manufacturing time and cost and also to reduce the complexity of the manufacturing process required to make complex integrated circuits is desirable.